Chapter Text
DAY 7
The baby dinosaur that followed Mikey home from a tuber-gathering trip at the end of their first week in the Cretaceous had two black, inquisitive eyes that followed the turtle wherever he went. These sat, forward-facing, atop an angular nose and jaw lined with tiny, sharp teeth. A startling mat of fluffy, wafting baby-down was already giving way to a more mature coat of silkier feathers beneath. The intermediate result, however, was a patchy mess that simply made it look like someone had half-heartedly tarred-and-feathered the poor thing.
“Kaaaaaark!” it burbled, stretching out its skinny neck and angling its head just-so to get a better view at the Timestress and three turtles, who sat, astonished, around the crackling fire in the deepening evening.
Mikey threw an encouraging smile back at it. “It’s alright, girl! Nobody’s gonna hurt ya!”
It hopped toward Mikey. “Kaaark?” it cried again, the sound emanating from the back of its throat in a high-pitched warble, like a question.
“Mikey?” Leo rose slowly, his hand automatically moving to the katana on his shell. “Back away from it. Slowly.”
Michelangelo’s eyes widened in shock. “Leo, no!” Mikey side-stepped in front of the small dinosaur, whose back had noticeably bristled at the strange hissing sound of steel against the sheath. It fixed its bright black eyes on Leonardo. But Mikey was talking fast.
“It’s fine! She’s just a baby, can’t you see, dude? She was lost and hungry. But I gave her some of my possum-jerky or whatever it is, and now we’re buds. Huh, girl?”
To Leo’s amazement and consternation, Mikey reached out a closed fist and the young creature reciprocated by bumping its head eagerly against Mikey’s knuckles, emitting a happy guttural chirp as it did so.
Renet clasped her hands together. “Omygod, Mikey! She is mondo adorable!”
“Sure,” Raph shook his head. “If ya think ‘adorable’ is a cross between a turkey vulture and a Muppet.” He watched the strange animal jump lightly up onto the log where Mikey had taken a seat. It scratched behind its ear with one long, three-toed foot. “What even is that thing?”
“It’s a Tyrannosaurus.” Donatello’s voice rang clear, his words unmistakable despite his stuffed-up nose. And Raph detected more than a note of admiration in it.
Leo, who had still been standing, sank heavily onto the log as all their eyes flickered to Mikey and then back to fix on the small interloper.
“Mikey brought home a Tyrannosaurus Rex?” Leo’s expression crinkled in horror, his voice pained.
“No way!” Mikey objected, his voice rising. “There’s no way, Don. She’s too little for that.”
“You sure, Donnie?” Raph shifted on his seat.
“Absolutely.” Don’s eyes were locked on the creature, mesmerized. “I mean, I know she’s small now. What do you think? Less than a foot tall? She's narrow, but tyrannosaurs are famously more gracile when they're young. Just give her a healthy diet of red meat and 20 years or so, and she’ll be tall as a house and as long as a bus. That’s if you’re right about her being a girl, Mikey. The females are bigger. She’s incredible!”
“Donatello, stop encouraging him,” Leo muttered, flashing a quick glare at his brainiac brother.
Raph snorted a laugh. “You sure do know how to pick ’em, Mikey.”
Silently, the group took in her two absurdly tiny hands, her skinny but already-powerful legs. As Mikey fed her tidbits of meat rescued from the fire, she craned her neck upwards to let them slide down her throat in an enthusiastic scarf. And they knew that Donnie was, as ever, right. Their exuberant brother had just adopted a fluffy, charismatic, fugly-adorable monster. And there was no going back.
That night, Leo put his foot down. No dinosaurs in the cabin. The T-rex could sleep outside of their hastily-constructed shelter, but definitely not inside. And that was final.
Two hours later, in the dark of the cabin, the small carnivore was curled like a cat in the crook of Mikey’s arm, resting on a nest of the clothes the turtles had been wearing as disguises when Renet’s time scepter had brought them here. The creature's lanky legs folded under her body, her feathered tail draped over her head and its fan-like end twitching occasionally to tickle Mikey’s plastron as the two slept. A soft rumble escaped her chest, as if purring, and sometimes her nose would wrinkle or her legs would spasm as she dreamed.
Leo, the only one awake, sat watching her with aggrieved, battle-weary eyes. Bars of moonlight leaked between the cracks in the dogwood-branch walls, falling on the admittedly peaceful scene of his brother and this wild, non-domesticated, potentially-vicious creature.
Where had his arguments gone wrong? This thing wasn’t Klunk, with a few thousand years of domesticity under the skin. It wasn’t even house-trained. Nor was anything else on the entire planet, for that matter. Its parent might come looking for it. It might get hungry in the night and snack on someone’s toe. Who even knew what kind of parasites it could be carrying! This was a wild animal, the most wild animal imaginable.
But it had been Mikey’s obstinacy, his fierce determination that if Velma—the creature’s new, inexplicable name—had to spend the night in the forest, well, so would Mikey.
The thought had sent a swell of fear through Leo. The idea of any one of them outside in this incomprehensibly vast, unknown wilderness with hundreds of potential dangers waiting to pounce from the shadows was not one Leo could tolerate.
It wasn’t as if the cabin was going to help with any of this, of course. Its walls—and everyone within them—could be squashed by a careless step of a long-necked Alamosaurus they’d seen trundling by in the distance. A raptor could kick through the door without much trouble if it were hungry enough, and even the non-dino parade of potentially-venomous snakes, scorpions, and spiders could pretty much move freely in and out.
Not to mention the rock hurtling through the solar system straight toward them at “about 44,738 miles per hour” (Leo didn’t ask why Donnie knew this number and he didn't want to know). And Don had made it clear that, when the asteroid hit (apparently just about any time now) nowhere on Earth would be truly safe from the cataclysm. Donnie said they were in North America, on the very same continent that the impact would take place.
The truth was that Leo felt a familiar, nauseating spinning. Eight days of waiting had passed. Leo’s toehold on hope grew more desperate every time the moon rose and Lord Simultaneous had not arrived to rescue them. What was the man waiting for? An embossed invitation? He had access to all the incomprehensible vastness of space and time. If he had plans to save his apprentice Timestress and the four mutants who'd helped her preserve the timeline and rescue humanity, wouldn’t he have done so by now?
But, against all reason, something about the cabin helped Leo feel safer. In control. Sheltered. They could at least be together inside of its four walls and, one night at a time, shut out the certainty that they were stranded in a doomed world. It had been enough, at least, for Leo to get a few hours of sleep each night.
And now, barely even a week in, here they were inviting part of that treacherous, chaotic world into their fragile sanctum along with them—this unpredictable creature that, of course, Mikey now loved in that immediate, wholehearted way that Mikey always loved.
Leo heaved a breath. It wasn’t just this one creature, he knew. It was finding himself in this same, terrifyingly familiar position. Unable to protect his family, to strategize his way around all of this.
He recalled the words of the Ancient One, his voice high and husky in Leo’s memory: “If there was nothing more you could have done, why do you punish yourself so?” Why, indeed?
Leo took a minute to quiet his thoughts, to take in the flowering magnolias that perfumed the night air and the sounds of his family sleeping around him.
Tomorrow would be another day, another day to do everything he could do for his brothers, for Renet, and now also for this new addition to their ragtag little group, Velma. If she was sleeping in the cabin, she was part of it all now.
That would be all he could do. And it either would or would not be sufficient.
“I surrender,” he whispered into the darkness, the words an echo of those he had voiced in Japan all those weeks-that-felt-like-years before.
Finally, Leo stretched his shoulders and then leaned sideways to pull Donnie’s makeshift blanket—a worn trenchcoat from the museum disguise—farther up his brother’s shell before he laid his own weary body down on a reed mat and closed his eyes.